In a shocking post on its blog, OpenAI Board of Directors announced that it has fired the Sam Altman, the CEO and cofounder. This is probably the highest drama in the tech world since last year’s acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, and probably the most dramatic ouster of a cofounder since Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple in 1985. Yes, that big.
Pretty much all of my tech news and media sources are abuzz with this. This is all especially fascinating to follow since the news keeps breaking on an hourly basis, with very rapid pace of new developments. Just a few hours after the news about Sam broke out, Greg Brockman, another prominent OpenAI founder, announced on X/Twitter that he was also quitting.
The board’s announcement was pretty terse and formulaic, and it leaves a lot of room for speculation. Many more details will come to light in the hours and days ahead, but here is my take on all of this, based purely on well established information.
There is no such thing as a secure job, especially at startups. Startups, by their very nature, especially those that are established and run in Silicon Valley, are extremely volatile workplaces. They can be incredibly fun places to work, particularly if you have lots of agency in working on high-impact projects, but you can never ever let your guard down, even if you are being incredibly successful.
OpenAI was originally founded as, well, an “open” alternative to the high-powered industrial AI labs. It seems that from the very beginning there have been tensions over what that “open” meant. This has lead early on to the departure of Elon Musk, one of OpenAI’s cofounders, and later spates of other departures of prominent researchers, many of whom have gone on to cofound alternatives to OpenAI, including Anthropic and X.ai. The non-profit status of OpenAI had changed to an “capped for profit”, which lead to infusion of extreme levels of funding, particularly from Microsoft. It has been known that Sam has been pursuing even more funding, as the scale and ambition of OpenAI’s projects has grown. It is clear that the “open” and “nonprofit” aspects of OpenAI have been seriously slipping for a really long time. Something had to give.
OpenAI is not just any company/startup, and AI is not just any technology. We are headed towards AGI, seemingly at a breakneck speed, and aside from a very few people most of us have not fully appreciated what that really means. Even in the best case scenario, a lot of things will be disrupted. The stakes are high and will only get higher. We should be prepared for even more turbulence in the world of AI in the upcoming months.